Meditations on Moloch is “soul-wrenching”, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ.

In what world do these people grow up? “Oh my God, conflict exists between interests and values, things are hard, not every problem is tractable”.

There used to be a refrain that “Moloch” is effectively Siskind’s word for capitalism, because he can’t bring his libertarian heart to name what everybody understands. But that’s wrong, because Siskind’s view is no more than the shallowest Burkeanism. And the worst thing about every single anti-Utopian is that they all assume everybody else feels as mugged by imperfection as they do.

For a moment I thought I’d replied in the wrong context, but it looks like I just straight up replied to the wrong thing. My bad either way

Ooooh somehow I replied to your reply to the comment rather than to the comment (originally replying to me)

lmao, are you doing a bit? What the fuck could you possibly know, and why didn’t you check the easily checkable history of the sub’s modlist? The fact that you felt compelled to make this up should, frankly, embarrass you away from offering your comments on anything to do with either the sub or this instance at all

Sure!

i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role

bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it

he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style

the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract

this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”

but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain

Well you make zero distinction between any of those things, most of which (BDS?!) aren’t even under discussion here, and your target is Ian Miles Cheong’s opinion-having about the US, particularly with respect to Oregon

What do you want me to do here?

Edit: let me rephrase that, what the hell do you want me to do here? Are you serious?

If the last act of the human race is to raise a forlorn statue of that woman in every town square it will be a fitting end

They aren’t their goalposts! They’re the goalposts already laid out in advance by the discourse and shaped in press releases since god knows when, that’s why it’s so easy to shift! There’s a whole avenue to be burrowed in Rationalism Studies, incidentally, about how Yud and his ilk inherited the same techniques from tobacco companies and the defense industry of the 1980s.

“focused discussion”…right

100% agreed, what terrifies me is that our friend here seems to see the word “science” in here and immediately assume impeccable faith and perfect knowledge

As a matter of opinion, I gotta say our brief new friend the other day did give me flashbacks to the one time I interacted with Siskind, even if it’s just that Siskind’s particular style of incoherent personally afflicted grandeur only happens to correlate with how pill heads express theirs

No, but Singer does mean stuff like “supply birth control to people who don’t have birth control” and “make them rich and educated so they have fewer kids” which eugenics or not is a real policy response by governments which had to deal with famine pursued